Introducing Dynamic Filters

Source filters are used in dashboards, alarms, and the situation room to focus on a subset of all available sources. Source filters could only be defined as a list of specific hard-coded sources.

Released on April 19, 2017, dynamic source filters have introduced new and far more flexible methods of both creating filters and specifying the members of the source list. Further, membership in a filter is now dynamic. That is to say that a source may come and go from a filter as the source’s properties fulfill the membership selection criteria of the filter.

Presently, dynamic source filter selection criteria are limited to

source name patterns, and;

how recently data has been received for the source.

In the near future, additional properties such as ec2 tags will be available in the selection criteria. These criteria are specified using a new simple query syntax which is described in detail here.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that one can configure an alarm to monitor a list of sources defined by a source filter – which is now dynamic – so that when a new source is added to Pulse one no longer needs to manually add the source to one or more filter lists.

Search in Dashboard Legend

The dashboard’s legend has been enhanced by the addition of a search box which provides the ability to enter a source query that immediately filters the sources in the current view. Type your query into the search box and see the resulting list. When you are happy with the results, press Enter and the listed sources will be selected into the current legend. This replaces the need for the ‘delete’ button next to each source, and hence the delete button has been removed from the legend.

Source Filter Definitions

The Settings -> Filters -> Add Filter panel has been completely overhauled. Prior to this update, the panel only provided the ability to add or modify the source names in a filter list:

The significantly enhanced panel now provides for entry of a query (selection criteria) and an optional description of the filter. It displays of the list’s membership as well. The panel is interactive in that as the query is being entered, the membership list is updated in real time.

Note that when we enhanced source filters, we converted any existing source filters from the older simple host lists to new selection queries. Users may find that they want to re-define their existing queries to take advantage of the new source query capabilities.